A couple of weekends ago I decided to bite the bullet and install SP1 for Visual Studio 2008. The whole affair was less painful than I expected and initially I was very pleased with the difference it seemed to have made to the sprightliness of the IDE. This short found happiness lasted for just one or two days and then the annoyance of Visual Studio crashing five or six times every couple of hours or so quickly replaced it.
After just putting up with it for a couple of days I could take it no more and started moaning like a child that’s dropped their ice cream in the mud to my colleagues. One of them asked if I had installed any other updates recently and so I had a look at which windows updates had been installed and this revealed:
• KB905866
• KB951618
So I had a look at what these updates were for and found that the first (KB905866) is a junk email filter update – an unlikely candidate I thought. The second (KB951618) is something to do with Onekey recovery – again doesn’t sound a likely culprit.
As these were the only updates that had been installed since I had installed SP1 I decided to uninstall them, and to this very day I have not had a single crash from Visual Studio. Now this may just be coincidence and I could be doing a disservice to some very worthwhile hot fixes here, all I know is that my dev environment was crashing with such frequency as to considerably reduce my productivity and now its not, so if anybody else is encountering the same issue it may be the same thing..??